Tourists traveling the picturesque Copper Canyon circuit in Mexico's northern Chihuahua state got a far different look at the country this weekend from the one promoted in glossy brochures. Taking to the streets for more than three hours on Sept. 13, hundreds of angry residents of Creel and neighboring communities prevented the Chihuahua-Pacific train from passing through Creel.

Mexico says it has arrested 12 people on terrorism charges in the years since 9-11—but an official said none were linked to Islamist groups like al-Qaeda or were planning to strike in the US. Mexico's Federal Institute of Information Access revealed the 12 arrests to the Associated Press in response to a request made in February seeking details of any terrorism arrests in the last seven years.

Tens of thousands of Mexican workers, tradespeople, doctors and nurses, oil workers, telephone workers, miners, teachers, parents, students and campesinos demonstrated on Sept. 1 to protest the economic policies of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa as he presented Congress with the annual state of the union report. Until two years ago, the president read the report to the two houses of Congress in an elaborate televised ceremony; the tradition ended in 2006 when opposition legislators kept then-president Vicente Fox Quesada from giving his last report. This year Governance Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino Terrazo simply handed a copy of the report to congressional leaders; the event took eight minutes.

The Zapatista Good Government Junta (JBG) "Corazón del arcoiris de la esperanza," based in the Chiapas jungle village of Morelia, issued a statement denouncing aggression by followers of the Organization for the Defense of Indigenous and Campesino Rights (OPDDIC) in the community of K'an akil, autonomous municipality Olga Isabel. Various shots were fired "without reason or motive" in the Aug. 29 attack against Zapatista campesinos—one of whom was wounded in the abdomen.

On Aug. 27 Mexico's Supreme Court of Justice voted 11-3 to uphold an April 2007 law in the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) allowing voluntary abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. The Catholic Church and the governing center-right National Action Party (PAN) had sought to have the law declared unconstitutional. The court's decision, which opens the way for other state governments to legalize abortion, became official on Aug. 28. (La Jornada, Aug. 28, 29)

On Aug. 21 Alberto Cervantes Juarez, first criminal court judge in Texcoco for the central Mexican state of Mexico, sentenced campesino leader Ignacio del Valle Medina to 45 years in prison for allegedly kidnapping state officials and state and federal police agents. Judge Cervantes Juarez sentenced 10 other campesino activists to 31 years, 10 months and 15 days on the same charges. He handed down the sentences in the Molino de Flores state prison in Texcoco; 500 state riot police guarded the prison to "protect" the judge. About 150 Atenco residents arrived at the prison later in the day to protest the sentences.

Most of the 23,000 school teachers in the central Mexican state of Morelos went on strike on Aug. 13 to protest the local implementation of a national plan called the Alliance for Quality of Education (ACE). The teachers, in Local 19 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), say that the plan is oriented towards consumerism and the commercialization of education and that it was imposed in ways that violate their constitutional rights. ACE was created through an agreement between Mexican president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa and Elba Esther Gordillo Morales, longtime national president of the 1.5 million-member SNTE.

Deadly violence is reported across Mexico Aug. 23. In Hidalgo, the bullet-riddled body of state police chief Raymundo Zamorano was found on a roadside a day after he was kidnapped at gunpoint while patrolling the streets of Pachuca in his official car. A Tabasco state police officer was gunned down at a police highway checkpoint near Villahermosa by hitmen in three pickup trucks. A second officer was wounded in the shooting. In Chihuahua state, 13 people, including four police officers, were killed—mostly in Ciudad Juarez, where prosecutors and judicial authorities were holding a regional summit. Among those killed in the city was Jesús Blanco, the new municipal police chief of Villa Ahumada. Two police were also killed in an armed attack on a checkpoint in Mazatlán, Sinaloa. In Valladolid, Yucatán, a taxi driver supposedly linked to the city's narcomenudista (low-level dealer) network was assassinated. (AFP, El Universal, El Universal, Aug. 23)